In a recurring series,Vanity Fairpulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, two-time Oscar nominee andW.E.costume designer Arianne Phillips talks about designing the clothes for Madonna’s film, including two evocative gowns for Wallis Simpson. Phillips is currently nominated for an Academy Award for best costume design.

For the key scene in which Wallis and Edward’s budding intimacy is revealed, Oscar-nominated costume designer Phillips dressed Edward in navy tails to match Wallis's navy gown. “It’s actually a replication of a Schiaparelli gown,” she says. Though the dress is not one that Wallis actually wore, to Phillips’s knowledge, “Wallis Simpson was a client of Elsa Schiaparelli and did wear a lot of her clothes in that particular period.”

Courtesy of Arianne Philips.

+−zoom

There’s a difference between beauty (God-given) and style (earned), and perhaps no one delineated it as clearly as Wallis Simpson. The twice-divorced American, who derailed a royal lineage by marrying Prince Edward, knew what she had and what she did not. “I’m not a beautiful woman,” she famously said, “I am nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.”

In Madonna’s W.E., costume designer Arianne Phillips makes good on that promise. Her Wallis Simpson (played by Andrea Riseborough) makes a compelling case for the power of sartorial sass to break hearts and, yes, change history. V.F.’s senior West Coast editor Krista Smith gave readers an advance look at Phillips’s deft designs in our September issue, and now Phillips’s work has been recognized by the Academy with her second Oscar nomination. (The first was for Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, in 2005.) For the occasion, she opened her notebook to share her original sketches with us, as well as the secrets of her process.

“The research was somewhat unique because it’s two parallel stories in one film: a contemporary story and a period story. There’s the biographical story of the Duke and Duchess, and then there’s the love story,” Phillips says. “I focused on amassing and absorbing the research—whether it was reading periodicals, reading online, seeing film clips, talking to people that may have known them, or people who knew somebody that knew them—whatever I could do to get my hands on any information about who these people were.” Given that foundation, Phillips then set out to curate pieces on the independent film’s limited budget. “I tried to be as resourceful as possible,” she says, and fortunately, she had a lot of resources. When she needed shoes, she called Roger Vivier. Suits? Dunhill. Dresses? Dior. Jewelry? Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels. There were even occasions when Phillips pulled jewelry from Madonna’s own collection.

The result was a thoughtful blend of vintage, new, and re-created pieces. Take, for example, the loads and loads of period lingerie. In many scenes, Wallis and her modern counterpart, Wally, appear in vintage pieces Phillips says she “found along the way.” In others, such as the scene in which Wally (played by Abbie Cornish) attends a Duke and Duchess of Windsor estate sale at Sotheby’s and examines a negligee worn by Wallis, the design is new. “Stella McCartney designed a few pieces for us, which was great,” Phillips says. Wallis’s narrative arc is driven by her costumes, which evolve with her experience: “Initially, when we see her when she’s sick, in the car, and she and Ernest Simpson, her husband, are going to Fort Belvedere for the weekend—it’s the first time they’re meeting Edward, [so] I tried to keep her clothes more naïve,” Phillips explains. “She always had impeccable style, but as her means changed and her milieu changed, her clothes changed as well.”

As Wallis and Prince Edward grow close, first through a friendship between equals, their clothes also begin to complement each other. For a key scene at a dinner party, Phillips chose to have them both wear navy. The pair literally match, revealing their intimacy from the outset. When they are officially outed as a couple, it’s also through style—Edward accidentally tears Wallis’s dress and she scolds him by his family name (David). When the guests turn to her, horrified by the familiarity and the reprimand, her explanation is simply that the dress is a Schiaparelli. (We’d be pretty steamed, too.)

The couple’s ensuing love affair is catalogued through jewelry. “The jewelry was legendary,” Phillips says. “One of the most daunting things about telling the story was making sure that she would do it justice in terms of the kind of iconic stature her jewelry has taken on. . . . The duke made it his mission to make Wallis feel like a queen, and took care in having the jewelry designed. There are a lot of inscriptions in the jewelry that are very personal.” The pieces were also very lavish. Phillips went to extraordinary lengths to commission authentic re-creations, including the Chiclet-sized emerald ring Wallis wears throughout their affair. “That was her engagement ring, believe it or not,” she says. “It was a re-created piece by Cartier, based on the original.”

Wallis, who begins the film naked in a bathtub, ends it bedecked in jewels and a graphic tunic—a John Galliano design for Christian Dior, a label the Duchess favored. “I thought [the trapeze shape] would be a wonderful device to help Andrea with that older-woman posture, because she’s playing her in her 70s at that point,” Phillips says of aging the character through clothes. “There are a lot of really great pictures of Wallis wearing capri pants and tunic tops in the 60s and 70s, [with] fantastic Roger Vivier flats.” The newer look extended from those buckle-festooned toes to her hair: the shoes “really balanced out that wig,” says Phillips, adding that “her hairstyle in the 70s was a big silhouette.”

On trend to the end, Phillips’s Wallis had more than 60 costume changes. In retrospect, does the costume designer feel she pushed herself too far, given the constraints of the budget and the scope of the film? Nah. “If anything, I could have had more,” she says.